KAIROS

On the simple but radical act of creating a place without phones or photographs, for people to meet and talk, and listen and learn, and eat and drink, and read and practice, and organise, and onwards.

Editor’s Note*

I’m going out tonight! In all seriousness, that’s partly because someone created a place for me to go….

I am attending a talk by Eleanor Robins, whose wonderful post on weirdness and intellectual rigour we shared here a few weeks ago. She will be talking about the value of memorisation in a time of instant-access information, particularly for the sake of our imaginations, which she wrote about here, and I believe the capacity crowd will engage in a joint practice of trying to memorise a poem together. I am intrigued by the talk and the practice, but that’s not the primary draw. I am also going somewhere with a high probability of good vibes, where there is food, a bar, and a spirit of convivial inquiry between people with overlapping interests and sensibilities.

This will all happen at Kairos, founded by journalist and activist Zoë Blackler, who writes for us below, and it is operated as the Kairos Counter-Club CIC at a wonderful central London venue (I admire Zoë’s entrepreneurial capacity to find and secure unused spaces that become the habitat that makes the club work). At Kairos, I know there will be people to enjoy hanging out with, and you can see the wide range of events and activities over the last few months and years on their Instagram.

I have given a couple of talks at Kairos, and they also kindly offer their venue for some Realisation Festival micro-events. It has been wonderful to watch the club grow since its inception. I think it works both because it meets a clear social, intellectual and emotional infrastructure need, and because it combines a spirit of friendly inclusiveness with a gravity of purpose and rules that keep the character of the place intact.

Dem the rules:

The phone rule is critical, and I particularly like “Anyone displaying a consistent lack of imagination will be asked to leave.” (With all due intellectual apologies, for those who like spiral dynamic colours, it is the seriously playful rules that make Kairos feel more ‘yellow’ than ‘green’, and more metamodern than postmodern).

Anyway! Please see below. Kairos has been on Tottenham Court Road, but now needs to move and is looking for a new place, and for funding to support the next stage of the project.

I’ll leave Zoë to convey the Kairos story in her own words, and hope to see you at one of their events before long.

Jonathan Rowson.

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In September 2023, Kairos moved into an empty furniture shop on London’s Tottenham Court Road. The events venue I founded and run took over a vast open-plan space in the heart of Fitzrovia, rent-free.

It was our third and most stable home since Kairos launched the previous year. With 3,000 square feet over two floors and a three-year “meanwhile” licence, we could focus on developing the project: building a convivial place in which to explore radical ideas for social and cultural change in response to the polycrisis.

We set up a cafe-style space in the basement where we held our talk events, created a screening area to show films, constructed a bar and secured an alcohol licence, set up a commercial kitchen, acquired a piano and a van-load of second-hand sofas, and started building a library.

I first started thinking about Kairos in the spring of 2022. Formerly a journalist, I’d spent three years in Extinction Rebellion’s media team, frustrated by the lack of mainstream debate about how to navigate the huge social transformations coming as a result of climate and ecological breakdown.

I decided to create a new space, a platform for radical thinkers, where those of us hungry for alternative ideas could gather around a newly emerging worldview. It would also be an alternative members’ club and an experiment in community-building.

I prepared two lists. One contained the questions I wanted to ask. The other, the people I thought might have answers and who I’d invite to be speakers. At Kairos, all discussions begin with the assumption that humanity is entering a period of unprecedented transformation, whether we’re shaping it or merely responding.

That summer, a friend invited me to the Realisation Festival - then in its second year - which is where I met my funder. In October, Kairos opened its doors for the first time in a run-down storefront on Holborn Viaduct.

Kairos is an ancient Greek word for time.

In contrast to Chronos, regimented clock-time, Kairos refers to a moment that is heavy with possibility, but also short-lived. I first came across the word in a quote by the archaeologist David Wengrow:

It’s time to change the course of human history. We appear to be heading into what the ancient Greeks called Kairos, a window of opportunity when our capacity for change is put to the test.

I offered David life-time free membership; his quote now hangs in the loo.

(There’s another alongside it, from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which echoes the sentiment:

Targeting a climate resilient, sustainable world involves fundamental changes to how society functions, including changes to underlying values, worldviews, ideologies, social structures, political and economic systems, and power relationships.

Our core events are salon-style talks –intimate evenings where numbers are kept intentionally small and plenty of time is reserved for discussion. You don’t have to be a member; anyone can buy a ticket. Food is central to all our evenings, which always include a one-pot vegan supper (prepared in our kitchen), which we all eat together. Phones are banned; strangers talk to each other.

To date, we’ve put on hundreds of talks and other events featuring radical thinkers including Dougald Hine, Vanessa Andreotti, Indy Johar, Roman Krznaric and Ann Pettifor. We’ve discussed Bruno Latour’s concept of an ecological class, whether civilisations can ever be sustainable, the importance of collective memory, and the internal psychological struggle between caring and uncaring impulses, among dozens of other topics.

We have a book club, a regular Open Projects Night, library opening hours, and a new Friday music series. We screen films, hold shared reading evenings and throw regular parties. Last year, during a series of events exploring the idea of the Commons, we began collectively drafting a new Charter of the Commons. We’ve hosted workshops to explore the legacy of the anarchist Colin Ward, to imagine a future world of multi-species flourishing, and to help us understand the true nature of debt.

Last month, after two and a half years in Tottenham Court Road, our landlord sold our building. We’ve been given three months’ notice to quit. Kairos is on the hunt for our next home.

While we love our sacred cave and will be sad to leave, we did know this day would come. The city has a glut of empty retail spaces, and we’re confident we can find another, as good if not better.

That said, this is also our own Kairos moment - an opportunity to move to the next phase.

Newcomers to Kairos don’t just find access to radical new ideas, they discover community with others awake to the risk of social collapse, also looking for active hope and a better way to live. Often, they only realise how much they need this place once they find it. Non-commercialised, non-transactional, semi-domestic spaces, where people can spend time in community, dialogue and conviviality, outside of their silos, is something we’ve all but lost. I’m regularly asked by non-Londoners how they might set up their own Kairos-type space in their home town, be it York, Berlin or Vilnius. And as much as we need these individual spaces, we also need the infrastructure connecting them.

In response, we’re setting up a network to support those creating their own spaces, and to amplify their visibility once they’re up and running. The Counter Club Network will launch later this spring. Collectively, we’ll develop an adaptable model that anyone can reproduce with its own location-specific focus and flavour.

In addition, we’ve been thinking about how to tie these intellectual, conversations spaces into the wider collapse-aware community. Starting in London, and inspired by radical places like the Africa Centre of the 1980s, we’re imagining a large building, or series of spaces, that would be a permanent home for Kairos, alongside a full-time bar and café, studios for an artist collective, performance and rehearsal spaces, and rooms for visiting speakers, scholars and other aligned overseas visitors from outside London. It would be a hub for the new counter-culture, where connections would happen, radical ideas would be born and world-changing projects would be incubated.

Zoë Blackler, founder of Kairos.

We’re currently talking to other groups about how to make it happen, and will be going out for funding.

In the meantime, we’ll be making the most of what we have for the next few months. As well as our talks programme and other regular fixtures, we’re planning a festival of intentional communities and the first of our new Bohm-inspired Dialogues. In May, we’re hosting “Big Bang 2”- an installation by Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn of artefacts, including the exploded van, from their film Bank Job – and focusing on alternative economics and the power of art for change. We’re holding our inaugural off-site Residency in April: Reworlding with Tim Waterman, launching a podcast of past talks, and developing our Community Membership scheme.

If you’ve only just learning about Kairos now, we’d love to see you here. If you’ve been aware of us for a while, thinking one day you must come and check out our space, that time is now.

Looking forward to seeing you at Kairos.

Zoë